[WikiEN-l] Fwd: Wikipedia is fun, but credibility varies a lot

Wed Jul 20 13:51:06 UTC 2005

Below is an email I sent to the author of an article that was semi-critical of
Wikipedia. I think it illustrates the way many in academia don't get it and how
many of those are polluting the critical thinking skills of students.  

--- Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2005 06:45:27 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Wikipedia is fun, but credibility varies a lot
> To: Susan.Barnes at rit.edu
> CC: maveric149 at yahoo.com
> 
> Just a note about this article
>
http://www.democratandchronicle.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050717/BUSINESS0105/507170321/1001/BUSINESS
> 
> 
> First, the English Wikipedia had about 640,000 articles at the time your
> article was published. Not 444,000. Second, Jimmy Wales started Wikipedia
> under the ownership of Bomis in 2001 - The Wikimedia Foundation was not 
> formed until June of 2003. 
> 
> If your article had been published on Wikinews, then these errors would have
> been very quickly corrected before being marked for publication. 
> 
> This just goes to show that *all* forms of media have reliability issues.
> This also shows that media published on paper with a PhD as an author is also
> prone to obvious errors. Giving students the impression that they can trust 
> that by focusing on the unreliability of web resources like Wikipedia is a 
> great disservice to them. All media needs to be scrutinized by students. 
> 
> It is true that we sometimes discount what an expert says ; the reason is
> that we value getting it right vs blindly accepting what an expert says 
> without checking. 
> 
> Daniel Mayer, 
> A Wikipedian
> 
> 
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
> http://mail.yahoo.com 
> 

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com 